No More Junk Mail

Getting to work on a Monday morning can be daunting enough. It shouldn't be complicated by an inbox stuffed to capacity with junk mail. That's right: the bits and pieces generated by all those tireless spammers who don't have anything better to do than litter cyberspace with their endless rubbish.

It's enough to give you a boiling case of email rage. So if you, like the rest of us, are tired of constantly fighting the SPAM wars, have we got a weapon for you!

The GroupWise Junk Mail Handling feature lets you automatically oust all your unwanted Internet email out of your inbox, making those Monday mornings. . .and, as a matter of fact, all the rest of those mornings. . .a little more tolerable.

To make it work, you need some junk mail to start with (like THAT's going to be a problem!), and the junk mail needs to come from an Internet address (don't most of them?). Right-click on the piece of mail. You'll see a drop-down list that includes an option for Junk Mail. Click the arrow, and you'll see a few more options.

If you choose Junk sender, all future email items from that email address will be delivered to your Junk Mail folder. Automatically. You'll never again see them in your inbox.

But wait! There's more! Take a short break from your celebration to notice the next option: Block sender. If you choose that option, no more email items from that address will be delivered to your mailbox. That's right: none. Ever. (Resume celebrating.)

Whew! Caught your breath yet? Then you might wonder what to do with the Junk Mail folder. If you're worried that you might accidentally junk something you actually want to read, go in occasionally and peruse the contents. But watch out: your Junk Mail folder (at the left, in the list of folders) can hold as many as 1000 messages. (After that, they start dropping off.) You can see how many items are in the folder with a simple glance.

To avoid jamming up your GroupWise, you can specify that all junk mail get sent to your trash after a certain period of time. Here's how:

Under Actions on the toolbar, select Junk Mail, then Junk Mail Handling. On the Settings tab, under Junk Mail Handling, check the box to automatically delete items, then specify the number of days you'll tolerate junk mail in the folder. After that, they'll be put in the trash can and hauled out to the curb without any further attention on your part.

That's all there is to it. Now, if someone could just invent a similar tool for the postal service. . . .